


black dirt

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Anxiety, Bittersweet, Dissociation, Multi, Slow Build, also there's no outright abuse but there's some kind of..off guardian/child dynamics, could definitely be read as mostly platonic actually, if thats your thing, self harm (nothing too graphic though), some fluff but not much feel-good, unsettling is a good word i think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 07:12:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1378552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody ever bothered to tell them that being scared was okay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> somebody please appreciate my useage of third person pronouns after writing nothing but homestuck fanfiction for like two years

“Please don’t go; you’ll drown,” Bertholdt says this at the exact same time as Annie’s look says _‘You think I don’t know that?'_ They are both eight years old but he remains in a cloud of naivety and he knows she’s so, so smart, logically there could not be any way she wouldn’t have factored in the bad weather and the impressive distance from the mainland to the lighthouse. But then there’s this part of his brain that refuses to believe that somebody so dedicated could exist that they would row across the bay in a storm because their father wants them to, because they have their orders, and because they haven’t learned to value their own life yet.

She keeps walking as the rain discolors her book bag. He tramps through the mud behind her. His father passed down to him a hefty set of rain-boots, and now Bertholdt wears them. They swallow up his skinny legs. The bright yellow raincoat fits him like a dress. Annie has nothing but her apathy toward the weather. 

“Please?” 

As the classroom filled up that morning, students crowded the windows to watch the rain come down, the clouds roll in, the air take on the color of a bruise. Throughout their lessons they heard the wind tug at the schoolhouse roof. During recess they were made to stay inside. A tree might fall on you, the teacher quipped; it’s dangerous out there. Trash was blown through the streets as they were turned to cold slush under the storm. The forest around the edge of town swayed side to side and at one point a tremendous crack was heard. There goes that tree, the teacher assured them. 

They sat under that weather-beaten roof together for hours, feeling the storm intensify, and nobody had to look at the harbor to know it had become a frenetic, roiling deathtrap. But as the clock ticked down the minutes, and the students grew more restless, nobody bothered to pull little Annie Leonhardt aside and tell her that she’d have to stay in town for the night, that the storm was too much for her to row through back to her father’s lighthouse island. The teacher opened the door and let the students out into the flooded street and Annie passed right by their knees and they said nothing. 

Ever observant, Bertholdt watched the dismissal in vague fear. If he was able to recognize the unsafe conditions, then there was no way the teacher would be able to miss it. And yet they did. He leaves the schoolhouse after Annie and watches her make her way down the street, mud splashing up the backs of her legs and with nobody stopping her, telling her ‘you can’t do that.’ 

He knows that the Leonhardts are scary people, that nobody in town likes them, he remembers his parent’s nervous titters when Mr. Leonhardt packed up his belongings and little girl to live in the lighthouse after the old tender died. Nobody likes them and he knows he isn’t supposed to like them either but letting Annie go doesn’t feel okay. So he burrows his head deep under his nearly luminescent hood and stomps off after her. 

“Bertholdt! Your house is that way!” 

The teacher recognizes that he isn’t headed the way he should be and he feels weird. The teacher is a careful person. He’s too young to know what word to use for the situation, but the idea he gets from the interaction is one of negligence. Nobody would ever suggest that a girl like Annie needed saving but he doesn’t see the harm in a little friendly warning. 

Naturally she ignores him. When he catches up to her he reaches out his hand to grab her shoulder, only to let it fall back just short of making contact. His hand hovers in space and rain slides off the tips of his fingers. Slowly, she deigns to turn around. 

That’s when he warns her to not go rowing home because she’ll drown. That’s when she disregards him and trudges onward to the harbor. 

It is an obvious and immediate defeat and Bertholdt is used to it. He’s accustomed to not being good enough for someone and then retreating and letting somebody more adept take over. But here, in the lonely wet street with the girl that people don’t want to think too hard about, there is nobody to relieve him of duty. It’s all on him this time and the knotting of his throat tells him he can’t just let her go on to the water, he really just can’t. He yanks one foot out of the deepening mud, then the other, and knows that she can hear him following her by the viscous noises of the sludge around his feet. She doesn’t look at him. 

He tails her all the way down to the piers not knowing what to say but that he’ll have to come up with something. Down the length of a dock with his eyes set on the back of her head, her eyes set at the rowboat bobbing at the end of their walk. 

“Please, no, this is a bad idea. Please,” this time he coughs up the courage to snatch at her wrist. She easily twitches out from his shaking fingers and they arrive at the end of the dock. “I…this isn’t…” he gulps several times as she crouches down above her boat. Waves have already swamped it, several inches of water sloshing around in the bottom, and spray from the ocean keeps flying into both their eyes. 

It is very cold there at the end of the dock, and Bertholdt is very scared (of the ocean and of Annie and of what he’s about to do), but he offers up a tiny “I’m very sorry” before looping his arm at her waist and rolling her onto his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He turns right around and starts back toward town, trying to figure out how to explain this to his parents before noticing that she isn’t protesting. 

Nobody bothers being outside as they walk home, so the only sound to hear is the storm and Annie’s occasional huffs of breath when Bertholdt steps too heavily and pushes his knobby shoulder hard into her stomach. He slips and stutters through town and eventually ends up on his doorstep. 

“If I put you down, will you run away?” He asks timidly as they both drip on the doormat. 

“No.”

He figures it isn’t a promise, not really, but it’s all he’s got for the moment. As lightly as he can manage, he settles her down onto her own feet again, making sure to place her between him and the door. Annie doesn’t make a break for it; instead she stands there, her hair slicked to her temples, rubbing at the shoulder-shaped bruise doubtlessly forming across her hips. Bertholdt wants to apologize but isn’t sure how to. 

When he lets himself into the house, his mother is immediately upon him, worrying over why he was so late. She quickly takes notice of Annie and slows like a wasp nest at nightfall. She turns to Bertholdt, her mouth slipping open to question him, but he speaks up before she can begin. 

“This is Annie; she lives in the lighthouse.”

The look on his mother’s face says that her suspicions have been confirmed. Everybody in town knows the Leonhardt nose.

“The weather’s bad and she can’t row back so I was thinking maybe she should stay here? Just until the storm blows over.” 

For a moment, he’s scared that she’ll refuse, and then there will be no keeping Annie from rowing herself across the bay. He knows his parents don’t like the Leonhardts, he knows that really nobody in town does, and from the stories he’s heard about Mr. Leonhardt, he supposes that there’s a very good reason for that. But it doesn’t seem right that sins should be hereditary; maybe Annie’s father is a little…eccentric, but that doesn’t mean she is. 

“Why…of course she can,” Mrs. Hoover concedes at last. She looks nervous but she welcomes both children fully into the house nonetheless. 

Annie keeps herself by the door and Bertholdt figures that she won’t move unless told to. It’s something that he’s noticed in their shared classroom; she’s smart, and she’s driven, but she only knows how to follow direct orders. 

So first he prompts her to follow him up the stairs to get her a dry change of clothes and a blanket to warm up in. He gives her one of his mother’s old nightgowns and it swallow Annie whole, the excess skirts wallowing around her feet and the neckline almost floating down her arms. After a quick tour of the house so that she’ll know where everything is he stands awkwardly in front of her at the top of the staircase. It feels awful, her eyes on his long nervous hands. Eventually she goes down the stairs and sits on the couch in front of their living room’s big bay window. And there she stays for a long time, looking out over the town from the slight hill his house is on and watching the harbor, trying to see the lighthouse through the slanted rain. 

Bertholdt feels that he’s used up his bravery for the day and so does not approach her until dinner is on the table. He shuffles into the living room with a bowl of soup slowly burning his hands and hears his parents devolve into whispers around the dinner table – there’s no need to wonder about whom. The light in the room is dim and gray and the color leeches from everything and he stands a few feet away from her. 

“I could have made it,” she assures him, turning her head toward him a little. The action gives him a perfect profile with her eyes hooded and heavy, just the way he imagines the eyes of the creatures that live along the silted harbor floor must look like. He walks forward with the bowl of soup but she waves him away. 

“You can’t just not eat,” he says very timidly, trying to approach her again. 

“I don’t know what’s in the soup.”

“Oh. Uh, chicken stock and uhm, potatoes…I think there’s carrots…yeah there’s carrots.”

“No. I mean I don’t know where the ingredients came from. Did you buy any from the store?”

“I think so? Yes?”

Annie tsks low in her throat and turns herself back toward the window. “My dad’s told me all about your stores. People will change the labels on the can; he’s seen it himself. So you can’t trust anything you get out of there because you can’t _really_ know what’s in it.” 

“I’ve…never seen them change the labels.”

“Of course not,” she says it like it’s the most obvious thing and he feels like she would have rolled her eyes too if she could care that much, “they do it secretly. If everybody knew then they’d be out of business. My dad’s the only one who’s figured them out and see? They made him go live on that island.” 

There really isn’t a lot to say to that. Bertholdt fidgets and meekly point out that “well, I’m sure your dad is very smart but I think he might be wrong.”

The air goes dense and Annie stays quiet for a long time. Eventually she says, “I could have made it,” and that’s that. There is no more conversation to be had. Bertholdt makes his way out of the room, the burns on his hands beginning to go numb, but when he stands in the doorway he looks at her again. She’s tucked into herself and too pale and however small she naturally is she’s finding ways to be smaller; her hair is still wet and her eyes look weighted like lead marbles and she muffles her breathing by pulling the blanket up over her mouth. Something about that whole picture strikes him as being very sad and he knows that it is a useless thought to have but he thinks he wants to be friends with her regardless. 

Making friends with anybody in such a cold, gray town is hard, especially for a person as warm and inquisitive as Bertholdt. He would watch his neighbors distantly greet each other on the street and sometimes other families got invited into his home, or vice versa, and everybody would have dinner and smile tightly. A little sea town like this one was deeply impersonal and the remnants of the people who washed up there like were never brave enough to know one another fully (they wash up like dregs, he’s always thought, like the dregs in the bottom of his mother’s tea mug). Up there, people are as cold as their ocean and pull apart from one another by the tidal schedule and Bertholdt reads about love in storybooks and he realizes that it isn’t something that happens where he lives. 

Without any examples it’s hard to figure out how to love someone. Especially somebody like Annie. But he has this thick feeling in his chest that it’s for the better that he try to, because she’s the only person he’s met so far that he really wants to know. When he gets older he thinks that if they’d lived somewhere else, where people knew how to be closer, then maybe she wouldn’t have been so distant and he wouldn’t have had to have been so nervous about the world. The hand he’s been dealt is nothing but a chilling ocean in front and soft dark pine trees on every other side, though, and he has to figure out how to make it work. 

He sits with her at lunch and learns that, true to her word, she never eats anything that wasn’t grown on her father’s island. Mostly it’s a messy bundle of vegetables, woody potatoes and ugly little turnips. The carrots are unusually sweet, however, and she occasionally will let him have a bite. She rolls her eyes at his sandwiches and crackers and the cookies that his mom sometimes bakes. They’re all probably poisoned, she scoffs. Or radioactive. Annie is deadly serious about radioactivity; her dad’s told her all about it. 

“It’s probably why you’re so tall,” she tells him solemnly one day. Bertholdt wishes his hair was longer so he could use it to hide his red face.

In the early evenings after school lets out, he walks her down to the pier and always wishes her a safe trip. This is met with a sneer and a sigh; “I don’t need your luck; luck’s bogus anyways.” Day after day, he wishes her luck regardless because he feels that it is the most he can do. A person like her could probably use some extra luck. At least that’s how he figures it. 

He learns how to fasten the little rowboat to the dock from her, how to tie the right knot. He complains once about how rough the rope is, and only once. Annie makes no room for complaints. As a result, her hands have knuckles almost as rough as the rope, and her fingers are hard like crystals. Each morning as she comes into the schoolhouse he takes note of how her hands are rubbed pink from the sea breeze and the oars of her boat, how the thick cuffs of her sweaters hold residual dampness from her trip. She walks in with a smell of the outside on her and unlike other students it never really dissipates. 

From day one, however, it is made dangerously obvious that Annie doesn’t want a friend. She doesn’t want a companion or confidant, she doesn’t need a partner in crime, she feels herself above human contact, she thinks he’s wasting his time. It would be a lie to say that her bluntness on the subject doesn’t deter him a little, and an even bigger lie to say that it doesn’t hurt him to hear her talk like that, but Bertholdt carries on. 

“Like the lost puppy I never wanted,” she admonishes one day in a rare fit of humor. 

(As they grow up, Bertholdt starts to notice how ‘it’s a waste of your time’ isn’t so much her way of telling him to screw off as it’s a more socially acceptable way for her to say ‘I’m not worth it so please don’t bother’ and making that realization is all he really needs for proof that he’s made the right decision).

They only see each other in school, and when summer break rolls around Bertholdt tries to imagine not seeing her at all for almost three months. As the classroom gets wilder and days get warmer, neither of them mention it and just keep to their somewhat-comfortable shared quiet, which Annie will fervently deny is a friendship. On the last day of school she tells him that she comes into town every Saturday morning to get fresh water for herself and her dad. Nine o’clock, by the public well, she’ll only be there for an hour at most but it would help to have an extra pair of hands hauling the water up. 

“Thanks,” he says.

She doesn’t get it. 

Most of their time together that summer is Bertholdt anxiously trying to convince her to stay in town with him longer. He entices her with stories of how a fisherman’s dog just had puppies and how all seven of them roll around on the front porch all day, playing in the sun; or how he found a really pretty little meadow high up in the hills with flowers that he hasn’t seen anywhere else before; or how a week is a long time, and he’s sorry for being weak but he gets a little lonely, so would staying in town an extra hour really do all that much damage? 

Each Saturday that passes brings one more invitation, one more excuse. Finally, one day Annie arrives at the well to see Bertholdt sitting on its lip, surrounded by buckets of water that he filled all on his own. Her eyes narrow as he gestures at his handiwork. 

“I did it all already for you,” he feels like he should say something more, perhaps apologize for being so clingy, or for how she means more to him than he means to her. But that’s as far as he can get before her look stills his throat and he ends up pushing his short fingernails into the bumps of his knuckles; it’s a bad habit he’s been picking up, and it’s starting to leave marks. 

She sits next to him on the well, in a heavy way that makes a puff of breath push out of her nose, and she turns to give him a very exasperated but not necessarily angry look. “I wouldn’t mind staying in town longer. I really wouldn’t. But dad doesn’t want me to have friends.” 

“Oh,” again, he feels the need to say more, but he’s so unused to voicing anger at anybody that he isn’t sure how it would come out. He knows she loves her dad, or is at least voraciously devoted to him, which isn’t quite love he supposes, and he doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. He gets very close to saying that her dad is awful to keep her from other people like that. That wouldn’t help anything, however. It wouldn’t help their tedious Saturday morning friendship, or what he’s convinced is her courteously stifled contempt for him, or how she already thinks that he’s weird and probably brainwashed for living in town. Instead of speaking he scratches the chalky granite that they sit on to dust under his fingernails, stopping only when one of them breaks down the middle. He doesn’t do anything about it, just thinks about her father’s rule. 

If she isn’t allowed to have friends then he doesn’t want to think on what that makes him.

They spend their hour sitting on the well and talking gradually, nervously, and Bertholdt can’t keep his hands from shaking and Annie blinks too slowly. After that he makes sure to get up very early each Saturday and fill the buckets and wait for her as the air is warmed by the heightened sun. Sometimes they walk around the town, or he will get her to go all the way to the forest with him so they can look at cool plants that he’s found. In August, he lets her know about the book that he presses flowers in, and they sit on his bedroom floor as she looks through the pages with intent. The following Saturday, she brings a fistful of tiny pink flowers that grow on her island.

Summer treats them both much better than the school year could, but the days shorten and the store is sold out of pencils and the first day back is upon them. Spending easy warm days avoiding people if he wanted to was nice to Bertholdt’s anxiety and now he just feels sick with worry. He’s never liked school, the way he would sit at a desk for hours and listen to the living ticks of thirty other human beings, hearing their tongues push around their mouths and their fingers tap against the desks and each heaved sigh at a particularly tricky problem. Being reminded that other people are so incredibly existent has never been something he’s dealt with easily, but then the added pressure of being expected to do his work perfectly, both by his teacher and his parents, that’s what makes him claw up his hands under his desk because if he doesn’t he’ll explode. 

Each consecutive year has been harder to handle, and as he starts fifth grade he can’t even get through the first week of class before having to take impromptu ‘bathroom’ breaks in order to hide himself away and try to remember how to breathe. But this year, he now has somebody to follow him. 

It’s the third week of school and Bertholdt has folded himself into the cover of the small cluster of trees in the far corner of the schoolyard. He’d only lasted an hour and a half before having to take a break and he digs his nails into the backs of his hands in a combination of nerves and disgust. It’s frustrating, getting so bad this early on, and especially after he’d started getting a little better the spring before. He sits with his back to a fir’s trunk and closes his eyes against the reality of having to return to class in a few minutes. 

“So this is where you hide.”

He jolts back, hitting his head against the tree, as Annie sits down beside him. “I’ve been trying to find where you go for a week. This is a good hiding place.” He nods vaguely, only gradually beginning to worry. Annie never has words of praise. The closest thing she has to showing approval is a certain low grunt and no clear dismay at someone’s lack of skill. She’s doesn’t give compliments and yet here she is, with a soft voice and her tiny hand settling on the back of his so he can’t scratch it up any more. 

“Is that okay?” she asks as she runs her tough thumb over his metacarpals. Later he’ll think back and realize the hesitancy in her voice, but at the moment he supposes she only sounds weird because she’s getting a cold or something. Annie doesn’t know anything less than utter conviction. 

“Yeah. It’s fine.” 

They sit together under the trees as a slight drizzle starts up. Bertholdt keeps his eyes on the pine needles and old beetle carapaces before him, occasionally glancing down at his covered hand (her hand is cool and feels nice on the raw scratches). Annie has her eyes upward, looking to the abalone sky and the tree branches meshing above them. Tiny little raindrops hit her face. 

Normally Bertholdt will ferociously try to pull himself together enough so that he can return to class without any suspicion. But today…he slowly relaxes his shoulders, breathing easier and loosening his back. He stretches his legs out instead of keeping them cinched into his chest and damp pine needles make their way into the cuffs of his pants. Slowly he leans toward Annie so that their arms press together and she lets him, though he can feel her tense through their jackets. They stay under the trees until the back doors of the school are pushed open and their fellow students run out for recess. 

“You want to leave?” she suggests, “we can go quick before the teachers come out.”

“I’ve never skipped school before…it wouldn’t be right…”

Annie turns to him, sliding onto her knees and looking severe. “It isn’t right that they do this to you. They won’t _let_ you have a good day so you’ll have to take one,” she grabs his hand and holds it up so they can both see the furrows he’s started sewing to his skin, “they shouldn’t do this to you.” 

He doesn’t say anything but lets her haul him to his feet and shepherd him from the trees and out of the schoolyard. She marches him toward the back of town, where the forest meets up with some of the newer houses, and where there won’t be any upstanding members of society to usher two kids back to school. 

“The meadow you told me about this summer, the one with the flowers. Show it to me.” 

High up in the hills, out of breath but with a good view of the town and harbor, they find the meadow and settle in the center of it. The rain has staid light and feels almost like mist against their skin. 

“The flowers are all dead by now, but here’s the plant. The leaves are pretty interesting too, really, but not as nice. We’ll have to come back in summer,” Bertholdt crouches down and pushes some grass away, showing the plant. Annie nods and stretches out on her back beside him with her feet pointing away from each other and her hands deep in her pockets. He pokes around in the grass a little while longer before laying down at her side to watch the slowly rolling clouds. 

Of course he’s still nervous. What will happen to the books and the backpack he left in the schoolhouse? When will his teacher notice that he’s missing? How long will his parents yell at him for this? This awful stone of anxiety keeps itself in his gut like a long, slow punch but up here the air is clear and light, and he can feel wind on his face, and Annie is so spectacularly quiet that he can close his eyes and he can’t even hear her breathing. It’s almost like sleeping but better since he knows there won’t be nightmares. 

At some point, he isn’t sure when, he actually does fall asleep and he only realizes when Annie shakes his shoulder. 

“Mmm?” 

“School will be out in an hour; we should start back now.” 

He pushes himself up and makes it to the meadow’s treeline before he stops. Annie is already halfway into the forest, notices he’s still when she’s in the middle of stepping over a fern. She slowly puts her foot down in the spongy earth. 

“I don’t want to go back,” he hopes he doesn’t sound as petulant as he thinks he does. 

Her hands are once again cool on his, her fingers pushing down the scratches smoothly, and she gently tugs him into the forest. “It’ll be okay,” she vows, “I’ll make it okay.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tumblr mirror - http://lichemonarch.tumblr.com/post/81126755896/heres-chapter-two-chapter-one-on-ao3-more

Promises like that can’t be kept and Annie knows that in the marrows of her bones. But she knows how to lie so that will have to be good enough. 

On her very first day of school her father had looked down at her as they stood together on their island’s small dock. She was too weak to row herself across the harbor so he would have to sit her in his lap in the splintery rowboat and row both of them. He’d covered this arrangement with her before, but he was about to detail another one. 

He tells her that she can’t make friends, and for years she had pretended in a flight of fancy that it had been his breath that was salty, not the ocean, since her island filled with her father smelled so much more strongly like brine than the town. He tells her that the people who shunted him onto this island had children and she’s going to go to school with them, and maybe they won’t look threatening but remember who their parents are. Remember who _your _parents are. Annie doesn’t have a mother to remember but she tries anyways.__

They get in the rowboat and his words hit the back of her head straight from his chest as he speaks, as she sits at his lap and watches her fingers grow cold. She can’t make friends because nobody in that town could understand her like he does, can’t make friends because children are mean, can’t make friends because they won’t want her. She sits quietly and takes it all to heart. By the time they get to the opposite dock she feels her first misgivings about school; she’s never been given to anxiety so it takes the form of paranoia. 

Her father isn’t a talker so the subject of friends comes up only rarely. Evenings sat across from each other over the kitchen table and they eat the approximation of soup that they make without any help from the stores, and her father looks up from under his eyebrows to warn her that friends only serve to drag you under. On their knees in the stony vegetable garden with a sack of compost in an attempt to leech something survivable from the soil and his big palm indents into the earth, the lay of his veins compatible with hers, he says their blood is stronger and she shouldn’t temper with it. After some long stormy stretch he comes down from the lighthouse with greased hands and his skin is all singed dark and he’s wild from the sleep he hasn’t gotten, she uses a stool to reach the counter to make herself a lunch and he stands in his thick coat with the fur-lined collar, fat globs of oil drooling off his hands, and he makes her swear that her only constants are himself, himself and maybe the stars if she ever gets lost. 

“Yes, father.” 

He needs the validation. 

But now Annie sits on the front steps to the schoolhouse and Bertholdt sits next to her, hunching in on himself. 

“They really didn’t like…that,” he says, “they yelled at me a lot last night. I’ve always been a good student I guess they just…I’ve never just _left _before…” She watches as his hands crawl closer together across his knees and it’s obvious what that means. She scoots herself over the cement step and taps their hips together. Bertholdt looks up and she takes the breach in his attention to cover one hand and keep it on her knee, far away from the other.__

And well, she guesses that just having one friend would be okay. 

Then this big blond asshole moves in next door to Bertholdt and her plan slowly crumbles through her fingers. 

She’d been hearing about how the old angry man who had lived next to the Hoover residence since before Bertholdt was born had a stroke and died. (“He lived alone, and he had these two cats; they didn’t find him for three days, and I guess the cats got hungry, and they…” Bertholdt had taken a deep breath through his nose when he told her the story, “I don’t think I like cats anymore.”) The house had been put up for sale and the town figured that they knew how this would play out. The housing market was reasonably relatable to water going down a clogged drain, which is to say it was slow, messy, and generally avoided by anybody who had the privilege of doing so. Nobody would move into a town such as this and the house was easily expected to sit empty for several years. It didn’t even take a month for a buyer to appear. 

That made front page on the local newspaper.

At first look, the new neighbors appeared as wholly disagreeable as the old. It seemed that there was only a man, probably in his late thirties, who kept to himself and looked largely surly. Soon enough though, it was discovered he had a ten year old boy with him who acted as a polar opposite. The man staid inside almost all day long, appearing only to shop for groceries and get mail from the post office, while the boy went around the neighborhood and introduced himself to everyone as Reiner Braun, nephew and soon-to-be fifth grader. To Annie’s tentative surprise, he immediately took a liking to Bertholdt. 

Everyone in the schoolhouse immediately started fawning over Reiner, the underclassmen amazed that he readily treated them like human beings, the upperclassmen finding him increasingly tolerable, and the teachers loving his tenacity. And out of the entire school Annie watched him pick Bertholdt and, by extension, her. 

He would sit with them at lunch, loiter around with them in the schoolyard before first bell, and after a week had the audacity to walk down to the dock with them. It was a shock to the system; the only people that Annie was used to were her father and Bertholdt, and both of them were reserved and quiet, whereas Reiner was very loud and incredibly warm and liked to (oh God) _give hugs _. She bit him on the shoulder the first time he tried to hug her, and when he gave her space but still laughed she kicked him in the knee hard enough to topple him. Bertholdt adapted very quickly to the hugs and it made her feel like she’d been doing something wrong the entire time she’d known him; she just didn’t know how to touch people. But it looked like she was about to learn.__

For the longest time she tried to be cautious. She never spoke much in Reiner’s presence, would go ahead of the other two when they walked down to the dock, tried to make herself even more wholly disagreeable than she already did because change is a little scary when she can’t control it. It’s a little scary, too, to think about growing apart from Bertholdt when he realizes that there are people out there more interesting or friendly or funny than her. Not having friends was okay but now it isn’t something she really wants to go back to. And so she keeps her distance. 

Reiner isn’t compatible with distance. He keeps drawing her back into conversations, jogs to catch up with her when she walks too far ahead of them, calls her scowl charming but insists a smile could be even more so. When he compliments Bertholdt like that he gets a bunch of nervous gulps, but she just elbows him in the gut very hard. He never seems to notice. 

It doesn’t take more than a month of this nonsense for Reiner to sandwich himself between them one day at lunch and say, “my uncle says that I can have people over for a sleepover.” He glances between them slyly before continuing. “He’s a real heavy sleeper; we could sneak out.” 

“I can’t stay in town for the night,” Annie immediately says. She also wants to add that this is considerably the most boring idea she’s ever heard, she’s seen the town in the daylight and can’t imagine it’d be that much different once dark, but she holds her tongue for now. 

“You did that one time.”

“You know why I staid.” She glares at Bertholdt. 

“A storm, it was because of a storm, right?” Reiner leans forward on his elbows, bouncing his leg a little underneath of the table. Bertholdt nods. Annie draws her mouth thin, feeling betrayed. Nobody is going to make this easy for her. “Well, then we’d just have to wait for another storm.” 

She manages to avoid being caught in town by a storm for a while, but her luck does not hold out forever. Rain begins falling before she leaves home and throughout the day she watches it blur the windows. The teacher keeps them inside for recess since the playground has been turned to mud. 

“You know what this means,” Reiner drums his fingers on her desk, waggling his eyebrows. 

“I can get home in this.”

An argument brews and is close to breaking wide open before Bertholdt joins them. “Annie, please…it’d be fun. I haven’t seen you outside of school once this year.” 

Her eyes narrow at both of them but she slowly nods anyways. “Fine. But only because he asked so nicely.” 

As much as Annie hates to admit to anybody beyond herself being right, by the time school lets out the rain and wind have gotten significantly worse and maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be wise for her to row home. So she leaves her father alone for the night, leaves the boat at the dock, mashes through the sludging street on her way to the Braun household, refuses to be intimidated by it. It comes as a surprise that somebody as warm as Reiner can live in such a chilling home. 

It isn’t ever clear if his uncle is home, even though he would have to be; the man never leaves the house. When Bertholdt goes next door to get pajamas and a toothbrush, she decides to bring it up instead of sitting in clammy silence. Reiner is quiet. He doesn’t know how to answer so they go on in the clammy silence regardless. As they listen to Bertholdt fumble with the front lock Reiner speaks. 

“I mean, this is a little weird but I don’t really know him…I can’t remember. I don’t even know if he’s my uncle.” Throughout it all he doesn’t sound like Reiner. Annie thinks they might be able to get along. 

That night they do their best to fill up the dark house with their light. Reiner tries to cook for them but at the end of forty five minutes the pot has caught fire twice, what could have once been food is now an uneven black crust, and Bertholdt has managed to cut his fingers several times over and sits at the table carefully laying bandaids over the tiny knicks. At that point Annie grabs Reiner by the ear until he admits defeat and they all have dry cereal for dinner (even Annie. It’s her first food from the store). 

“It’s so sweet,” she wonders. Cane sugar is a new experience for her, and it is sweet in a way intensely beyond the sweetness of fruits or vegetables. She licks her fingers to get the sugar residue off, expression thoughtful. Reiner laughs. 

As the storm thickens beyond the walls, they all settle onto Reiner’s bed and hang their legs over the side, rain hitting the window above their heads. And then they talk. An easy conversation is woven through the hours of the night, comfortably shifting from silly to serious and back again, and as the storm lets up Annie feels her eyes go heavy, can’t stay conscious enough to keep the smile from her mouth. Bertholdt is the first to notice. 

“Oh gosh, you must be really tired,” he bends his long neck down to try and look her in the eyes. She blinks liquidly up at him. “I’ve never seen you…” She leans heavily on his arm and closes her eyes, thinking about sleep. On his other side, she feels Reiner snicker and do the same. Bertholdt squeaks a little but relaxes as the minutes pass. “Uhm. Uhm okay.”

“Goodnight,” Annie keeps her eyes shut, hoping neither of them know how weird saying that feels to her. 

They wake up the following gray morning in a tangle of limbs and with cricks in their necks, but not entirely disappointed. Further consumption of dry cereal is their version of breakfast before they stuff on boots and button their coats to wade to the schoolhouse. Annie is exhausted throughout the day, but she softly observes how Bertholdt doesn’t scratch his hands up, and how Reiner looks at her a little differently. She can’t figure out what in the look is different but doesn’t think she minds it too much. 

In the afternoon, they both walk her down to her boat and help her get all the water out of it. Before she gets in she relents. “Maybe we could do that again. Sometime. Or something.” Reiner grins and puts an arm around both of their shoulders, pressing them into his slippery jacket. 

This time she doesn’t even get the urge to bite him. 

Back at home she quickly remembers how the floorboards squeak, the mold on the ceiling from the sea damp, her father’s pale eyes observing her from under his thick, thick eyebrows. He gives her a quiet congratulations on making an executive decision like that, that he would have done the same thing under the circumstances, and doesn’t notice the feeling that slowly hits her in the gut. As he patters around the lighthouse tower, she sits on her bed with her knees pressed to her chest and tries to tell herself that she doesn’t miss them. She doesn’t want to live in town. She isn’t jealous that they are next door to each other while she’s out in the middle of the harbor, too far away to even tell which lights belong to their houses in the darkness. She doesn’t think on Reiner’s warmth and the clean smell of whatever soap it is that Bertholdt uses. 

Leonhardts don’t need anybody but themselves. 

Winter deepens and Annie feels herself grow colder by the day. She spends nights under the showerhead, water pressure gentle like melting ice, and she grimaces when she realizes that the weather isn’t chilling her because her skin can be red by heat while she continues to shiver. Winter deepens and she thinks she misses the taste of sugar and she wishes for another storm. 

Spring comes, Annie turns thirteen and doesn’t tell anybody, and the cold won’t go away. But Reiner has gotten her used to physical contact at that point. Touching helps a little. Being off of her island helps a little more. The subtle anger that she settles into at the sight of Bertholdt’s hands keeps her warmer still. One day in April, when Reiner is home sick and Bertholdt can’t seem to function, she curls in the stand of trees on the edge of the schoolyard with him. Missing class again. The sky is raining open in fat drops but the sun is out, making the roofs of the houses steam and the harbor electrically bright, the rain refracting small rainbows and mugginess makes the walls of their lungs sticky. At first she holds his hands and as he doesn’t stop shaking she rests her mouth against the raw scratches; he’s started drawing a little blood. At that Bertholdt makes a dry, pleading sound and she thinks he might be crying but refuses to look up. 

Then he hugs her and she isn’t quite sure what to do without Reiner there to buffer them. He keeps apologizing so she puts her thumb across the corner of his mouth to try to tell him to shut up without actually talking; she doesn’t trust her voice at this point, where she can feel his tears on her hand and how his breathing shakes his ribs like an accordion. 

Rain that day is light and saccharine, nowhere near a storm, but she won’t go to her home that night. She owes him more than that. After school lets out she scrubs his face clean by the pads of her fingers and leads him home and glares at his mother. Once they’re in his room he doesn’t let go of her. And he won’t stop his apologies. 

At one point she puts her hands on his cheeks and leans their foreheads together, both of their awkwardly prominent noses bumping. She grits her teeth, thinks of how Reiner is just next door and she wishes he could be here because he’s the one who knows how to make people feel better, not her, all she knows how to do is pick pebbles out of her seaside garden and to dress her wounds and to row her stupid boat across the water, a few years ago she had never even considered talking to anybody but her father yet here she is. Here she is with this nervous boy in her hands who gets a little more cold and a little more bitter as each year passes, and it’s probably her fault, here she is and she isn’t sure what to say to him and why can’t Reiner just show up and solve this? 

So Annie doesn’t say anything. Bertholdt catches her silence through her thumbs on his temples, through her small breaths at his mouth, through her eyes closed tight in frustration. They sit together on the bed, neither sure which one of them is shaking so maybe they both are, and don’t move until they hear footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Dinner’s ready,” Mrs. Hoover knocks on the door twice. 

“Alright. We’ll be down in a minute.” 

Annie is proud of how steady he keeps his voice. She gives his cheek one last stroke before they unfold themselves to go have dinner. That night, she eats her soup. 

Night is spent figuring out how nicely Annie fits to his chest, without a lot of talk or eye contact. As they drowse off after several hours of distant conversation Bertholdt admits that he wishes Reiner was with them. Initially, Annie thinks she should be offended by that but she just ends up nodding slow agreement. Because it isn’t that she’s insufficient, it’s that they’d all function better as a whole. That’s what they are now, she thinks, they’re three parts of a whole, and it feels a little wrong for there just to be the two of them. 

“I do wish he was here, but also…I want to clarify something,” Bertholdt hides his face. She allows it. “Just because Reiner’s right next door to me, and you’re out on your island all the time, that doesn’t mean that…I don’t…” 

“I get it; you don’t have to say it.” She knows how words can trip him up. 

“No. You mean just as much to me as he does. Even if you’re far away, and he’s right here. And I know that he likes you a lot too. He’d never tell you though, because he’s afraid you’d punch him.” 

“What makes you so sure I’m not going to punch you for all this?”

She feels his smile open up against the back of her neck. “You wouldn’t punch me.” 

“Hm. I guess you’re right. But only because you’re too tall for me to hit anything above your bellybutton.” 

“Go to sleep.” 

“ _You _go to sleep.” She knocks her head back lightly against his nose. Finally, almost to midnight, they can both breathe easy with that day’s anxiety bled out.__

Come morning, they’re both screamed awake by Bertholdt’s mother. The idea of comfort through closeness is lost on her as she tears the blanket off of them, not caring that they’re both fully clothed, and calls Annie a slut. Bertholdt looks lost and terrified. Annie is quick out the door, on her way to school early it seems, and gives him a dark little smile on her way down his front steps, Mrs. Hoover red-faced in the front doorway. 

As she passes his house, she notices Reiner looking down at her from his bedroom window, then trying to crane his neck around to get a glimpse of whatever was causing the screaming. He’s downstairs and opening the door in seconds, beckoning her onto his porch. 

“Holy shit, what happened?” He has to lean on the doorframe, pale and sweaty with red-glossed eyes, smelling like illness. But he manages to smile anyways.

Annie shrugs. “I don’t think Bertholdt’s mom likes me anymore.” 

“Obviously, but what’d you _do _?”__

__“I’ll tell you when you’re not sick. It’s some incentive to not die.”_ _

__Reiner rolls his eyes in retreat. “Fine, fine. I’ll probably be back in school Monday.”_ _

__“Good.”_ _


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tumblr mirror - http://ketchupson.tumblr.com/post/81348373920/and-chapter-three-last-chapter-chapter-one

Reiner spends a lot of his time being vaguely confused by everything that goes on around him. When he moved up to the crimped northern town with his uncle, leaving behind a warm city with fruit trees on street corners that he can struggle to remember, his memory was full of holes. He knows he lived in a big, empty house but it’s hard to know who else lived there. He knows that his uncle walked him through a sweet twilight to a train station and they spent three days distancing themselves from something. He knows that he got off the train and there were no fruit trees or street corners, there was a road full of thick gray mud that stuck to his shoes like cement and everything else was a silvered field of grass, hedged in by the north’s characteristic black pines. And he knows that he spent eight days walking through the country to the port, eight days where his uncle silently dared him to complain, of sleeping on dripping moss beds, of rationing and bleeding feet and a permanent cold. There was one night, fireless because everything was damp in mist, that they slept under a fallen tree. Lichen dropped in their hair. 

“Now Reiner,” his uncle said, “I know this seems bad now. But life will be better for you once we get there.”

“It’s so cold here though.”

“There’s worse things to be than cold, Reiner.”

Even then, Reiner can’t remember what they would need to be safe from. 

He doesn’t pay too much attention to his memory, or lack thereof, until he hears his fellow students mentioning things that had happened to them one, two, three years ago. For the first time he draws a blank because for all he knows nothing happened to him before the last few months. A lot of time is spent trying to remember. He tells his uncle that he wants to know what happened. 

His uncle, leaned over the pocked kitchen table, looks at him. They superficially resemble each other, but the longer you look the easier it is to realize they aren’t truly alike. “No, you don’t. That’s why we’re here.”

Reiner meets the ocean with a lot of questions and nobody to get answers from. He tries to keep quiet about things, but eventually ends up telling Annie anyways. Most lies come easily to him but Annie has a distinct way of making truths happen. 

They walk through the edge of the forest, crossing the road that Reiner came into town on, and this afternoon it’s just the two of them. Bertholdt usually accompanies but his parents warned him to be home directly after school. Over the years, the Hoovers have become slowly more suspicious of the cunning blond children their son keeps company with. A lot of excuses and sudden appointments have started arising whenever Bertholdt wants to stay out for an hour after school. 

So that day it’s just the two of them. Reiner is feeling a little funny; his uncle’s been weird, been disappearing from the house he normally never leaves, been tensed with nerves born of…something. That’s when he loses steam. Whatever is worrying his uncle must be something from down south, and thus something he can’t remember.

For a moment he goes quiet because this forgetfulness is fearful. Then he asks Annie, “Why can’t I remember anything?”

She’s thoughtful for a moment, parsing her options. They’re sat on a log and she’s unable to touch her feet to the ground so starts bouncing her legs. 

“I don’t know…but my dad knows a lot about how people work. He’s told me stuff about it. That when something bad happens, that your brain wipes it away because remembering would be too much for it to handle,” she clears her throat as a way to waste time but it’s still obvious what she’s about to say. “So I guess something bad must have happened to you.” 

Reiner looks down at the loamy earth under his feet. “I think I knew that part already.” And he guesses that he did, he always knew that even if he didn’t know anything else, knew it in the way his uncle didn’t talk and the way his chest gets too tight sometimes when he first wakes up from a black sleep. There isn’t much to say after that so he takes Annie’s hand in silence, pressing it down into the spongy log beneath them. She stretches her neck long against his arm so that her chin hinges around his shoulder.

“It’s okay. Sometimes I get the same way.” 

He’s surprised. It had always seemed like if any of them had their act together, it would have been her. “Really?”

“It’s my mother. I can’t remember my mother.” Her words press into his arm straight from the warm run of her throat. From Annie, that’s a confession. 

“Oh.”

“So I’m not exactly like you. But a little close. I guess.”

A little close is one word for it, but Reiner doesn’t put too much thought into that. He closes his eyes, feeling her against his arm and the moss under one hand, her hand under the other. He wonders when she stopped being so bitter and started getting…mournful isn’t quite the right word, but it’s the best thing he can come up with. Maybe it’s part of getting older; being sad when they were kids was tough, but then living through years and learning that things don’t go away on their own, that they’d never just wake up one morning with their brains sorted out, Reiner feels like that did something a little bit wicked to each of them. Annie just kept herself quiet about it. 

When she has to leave back to her island after their hour spent ‘working on a class presentation’ as she will tell her father, Reiner remains in the forest. He finds a new log to sit on after walking Annie down to the dock, this one newer and still sappy. The air is cold, the ocean colder, the forest thick like his uncles swallows over dinner and expansive, the forest cages his town to the ocean and he stares at the ground. 

He wants to go back down south. 

For a week, Reiner thinks about actually leaving, actually putting everything he can carry into a bag, actually walking back down the muddy road to the train station, actually leaving his uncle. Not only his uncle though, but the town that he’s spent the last eight years of his life in, all the teachers he’s sweet-talked and students he’s studied with and the old woman who runs the grocery that he playfully flirts with every time he goes shopping. The longer he thinks about leaving, the more okay he becomes with the idea. But there are some things he refuses to leave behind. Something tells him that Annie and Bertholdt are just as ready to get out as he is, though. 

After a week of reflection, Reiner tells Bertholdt his plan. 

“You mean, like, moving? Out of town?” Bertholdt looks a little confused, and it would be tempting to say that it’s because he never considered leaving. Of course Reiner knows that isn’t true; every day as they walk to school, he sees the look Bertholdt gets when they take a turn off the main street to the schoolhouse. If they’d kept going straight they would have left town long ago. The confusion is because he never considered leaving to be an actual possibility. 

“Yeah. You and me and Annie. We could go south and find work or something. Just get out of here.”

Bertholdt looks down at his hands. Over the years his scratching has taken its toll; his coppered skin fades to a dark clay hue in thick scars down the backs of his hands, overlaying his bones perfectly because he is succinct. His fingers slot together like sardines in a can. “I…”

“Just think about it. We’ve got time.” Reiner taps his forehead against Bertholdt’s shoulder. Bertholdt reaches up and keeps his head there with a hand on the side of his neck. They don’t look at each other because that would be some sort of admittance. 

“I will.” 

The thing is, of course, is that Bertholdt is awful with change. But change can be necessary, is necessary as told by the scars on his hands, and Reiner gets the feeling that the southern sun could help bring the blood back to his face. 

Next he tells his uncle. It’s late at night, and Reiner stands in the doorway of his uncle’s study. The entire house is incredibly dark but the study is by far the worst offender. Three windows all with carpet-thick drapes over them, the floor polished shadowy, the walls thick with dust because nobody ever cleans them. His uncle sits at his desk, hands pushed into his graying hair worn long to give a more classical look. 

They know how to exist together but have never quite figured out how to converse. So Reiner remains quiet in the doorway until it becomes clear that if he wants to talk, he’s going to have to be the instigator. 

“Once I graduate, I’m moving out.”

“Mhm.” 

“Out of town. I want to go south again.” 

His uncle looks so old so suddenly. Small strands of hair fall over his face, the stubble around his mouth mostly covering the wrinkles there, and he’s gone wildly dark under his eyes. For many moments he stays still over his desk. Choosing words and making bets. Trying to figure out how to diffuse a strong-willed young man who is going to do what he wants regardless of anything, really. 

“Reiner, do not do that,” he speaks lowly and without looking up, though his eyes have gone wide. 

“You can’t keep me here–”

His uncle looks up then. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you down there.” 

“Then tell me.” Reiner shoulders himself out of the doorway and into the study proper. The stifled room manages to make him less imposing than he normally is, the darkness weighting him down like an extra layer of gravity. 

“No.”

Even though his uncle looks almost afraid, there is nothing more to say.

And that leaves one more person to tell. 

Reiner does not want to have this conversation with Annie. Because he knows that she’ll go with them but he’s asking much more of her than he is asking of Bertholdt or his uncle. Bertholdt needs to get out of this town, needs to escape from his parents and the people he grew up with, needs a breath of fresh air in the same way as a drowning man. His uncle will be losing something, but it was inevitable really; Reiner wanting to leave is no surprise. But it’s different for Annie. She’s never talked about leaving, and the whole town knows of her devotion to her father. He can’t understand how she’s so loyal to this paranoid, most likely broken man, but she is and asking her to leave that island is going to be a battle with multiple theatres. 

When he asks her, they’re alone at the dock. The backdrop of the ocean is making her look even smaller. 

“What makes you think I’m willing to leave.”

Suddenly, the ocean backdrop puts her power in perspective. 

“What makes you think I’m unhappy, or want a change. What makes you think that I hold my father in so little regard that I’d just leave him.”

“I’m just putting it out there,” he raises his hands defensively. “I’ve already talked to Bert about it.”

“What makes you think you matter so much to me that I’d follow you away to some place I don’t even know?”

Most people assume that Annie is always angry because they see her stony mouth and harshly-lidded eyes and they never hear her speak in anything but clipped little sentence fragments. That isn’t anger; that’s boredom. Anger is when her shoulders roll forward and her jaw sets heavy and there’s something in her voice that is surprisingly warm, but warm in the way lightning is warm. Warm like electrocution. Her anger is low and intense, and generally is used to frighten people off before they can think of what they did to find such a flaw in her armor. Reiner, of course, isn’t easily frightened, especially by somebody he could win a fight against by sitting on, but he knows when he’s said enough. Hearing her resort to shock value to try and get him to back off makes him take a step back. 

He can’t understand, could never really understand, how much the idea of leaving her father scares her. Because when somebody is told their entire life that the world is full of monsters chomping at the bit to devour you, that they will hurt you and use you and spend you, and you can’t even fight them because they’ll all have human faces; when there is a three year old girl sitting on her father’s shoulders at the very top of the lighthouse watching a storm roll in, and her father tells her that the world will hurt her, so she must make it her enemy, and that he will teach her how; and when the girl grows up as an entire town blames her silently for her father, when her mother is a void in her memory, when all of this convenes it makes Annie Leonhardt, the girl that is brave only because she never had any other choice. 

Because when he thinks about her father, he imagines a man who cannot comprehend tenderness. Not the father who watches his sick daughter in her red eyes and blue veins, who lets her hair down because by that point her arms are too weak for her to do anything herself. Not the father who had to teach them both how to survive her nightmares and how to pretend they never happened come morning because even if she can’t have sleep she can at least keep her pride. Not the father that only told her that friends are poison because he never had any evidence to the contrary and thought that even if he made his daughter’s life sterile, it would be better than what he’d had to fight through. 

There’s this great disconnect between them, because to Reiner family means nothing while to Annie it’s nearly everything she’s ever had. 

He leaves her at the dock after that, and later that day talks to Bertholdt about it. Bertholdt doesn’t say much, mostly nods along, while Reiner riles himself up, half from the sting of her words, half from the fear that she really would refuse to go with them. 

“I’ll talk to her about it later,” Bertholdt promises. 

Apparently he does, though Reiner isn’t sure when or how, because one night in late June there is a knock on his front door. He opens it to a thick night that still has the cool sea breeze in it and in the center of it all is Annie. She has a large backpack with her and her hair tied tight behind her head and she’s been crying. 

(They’ve never seen Annie cry. Reiner will cry, usually out of frustration, and he’s loud and angry about it, usually shouts and shakes until he’s too tired for more. And Bertholdt will cry and hates himself for it and rubs at his eyes so much to try to keep his tears in that they turn red and puffy. But Annie does not cry).

“Don’t touch me, don’t fucking touch me,” she hisses and shoulders into his house.

It doesn’t feel right to stay there with her so he grabs his toothbrush and goes next door. Bertholdt’s mother is not particularly enthused to find him on her porch at nine in the evening, smiling gallantly and asking to speak to her son. She lets him in regardless, mostly because Bertholdt appears at the top of the stairs and gives her a pleading look. By this point she knows that her son is leaving, and she also knows who it is that is taking him away from her. 

In Bertholdt’s room, Reiner outlines what happened.

“Shit, and she was crying too.” 

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

Bertholdt looks horrified, and a little like he wants to sprint next door to find Annie himself. But they both agree that they need to give her until morning at least to sort out whatever happened. 

They spend their night laid out in bed with their sides touching. It’s a little uncomfortable in the stagnant night but Reiner is too distracted to notice and Bertholdt is too polite to say anything. The air sits heavy on them in lieu of a blanket and it makes them both drowsy, just a little bit. 

“I guess we’ll really have to leave soon, then. If Annie came out here…I don’t think she’s going back…” Reiner says, but Bertholdt is already asleep. He traces the shadows on the ceiling with his eyes while thinking about what Annie might be doing, not even thirty feet away probably, tries to convince himself that he didn’t abandon her, remembers that his uncle is there with her and groans loudly. Why didn’t he think of his uncle earlier?

“Shh. ’S okay.” Bertholdt, still asleep, reaches up to pat him on the head but misses and hits him in the nose. 

It is not a restful night by any means and they are forced to wake up early when the rising sun hits the window, turning the room quickly into a sauna. They migrate to the bathroom but Bertholdt nudges him in the hallway. “Go check in on her.”

Reiner does. He sees his uncle in the kitchen, strangely enough. His uncle does not look very pleased, but nods to the stairs.

He finds Annie sitting in the bathtub full of cold water, her hair slicked to the back of her neck and her eyes no longer rimmed in red. Through the refraction of the water he thinks he sees thick knots of scars across her ribs, silvered with age, but he can’t find voice enough to ask, instead looking at the linoleum floor. She must know what he can see but doesn’t pay him any attention. 

She eventually asks when they will leave. He says as soon as possible. 

“Good.” 

She beckons him over to the side of the bathtub and leans out a little bit. Wildly guessing at what he’s supposed to do, Reiner sits down so they’re at eye level with each other. From how she has lifted herself out of the water he can see for sure that those are scars on her sides, not a trick of the light, and he spends too long looking – his uncle has some just like them. She snatches at the side of his head and even her short little nails are sharp at his scalp. 

“Don’t.” Then she lowers her head and says quite softly, “you have no idea what I’m leaving behind.”

There’s no way to apologize to that, really. 

That night, back in his own bed with Annie pressed into a ball against him, he imagines leaving. This time around, the moss beds will be dry and springy, not damp as they were with his arrival, and he thinks of them all sleeping together on the forest floor, spending their earliest mornings picking pine needles out of each others hair (he doesn’t imagine how, no matter how hot the day is, that night is cooler and cooler still when there are no house walls to trap the heat inside, doesn’t imagine the sounds of forest creatures that will walk just an arm’s length from their heads, cannot imagine that on the first morning Annie will wake them both up with an unsure kiss and that he will smile so hard that she’ll blush and punch him in the jaw). And the fields he saw when he first got off the train, now they will be gold and green and there will be wildflowers to pick, for Bertholdt to press into one of his books, for him to try and braid into Annie’s hair as they wait a lazy hour for the train. And all the mud of the road will have dried, replaced with a gray dust that weaves itself into their clothes and clots the saliva in their mouths and creases in the folds under their eyes, mixing with sweat and leaving discolored streaks across their skin. 

He imagines the train, can’t quite remember what it looks like or what it sounds like, but that it will probably be a welcomed reprieve after their week-long hike. He imagines the country flashing by so fast beyond their windows. And his imagination stops at getting out at the train station, the one his uncle stole him away to eight years ago, at the fruit trees on the street corners and the fact that they’ll all have northern accents that sound awkward in the warm southern air and all the ways that a big agricultural city is so different than a tiny ocean town. 

There is so much to imagine. For now he has his muggy little room, with Annie still angry but at his side anyways, and Bertholdt probably asleep next door – or, knowing him, wide awake and scurrying around his room, checking and double-checking that he’s packed everything that he needs. 

Again, there is much to imagine. But he will leave the doing for tomorrow morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now that this is finished id just like to say thanks for reading!!

**Author's Note:**

> okay so this is going to be three chapters and a little bit over 11000 words long hot damn i didnt mean for it to be so long..i really only need to edit a few things so each chapter will be put up a day or two apart since everythings already written. so i guess thats good news if anybody actually..likes...this thing.....
> 
> tumblr mirror is here in case anybodys interested - http://lichenmonarch.tumblr.com/post/80943501029/so-i-actually-wrote-something-and-then-i-even


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